Case Studies

Aberystwyth University

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Aberystwyth University, located on the west Wales coast, was founded in 1872 as University College Wales, it became a founder member of the University of Wales in 1894.

It consists of several geographical sites. The main campus is at Penglais and houses several institutes. The Llanbadarn Centre, approximately one mile away, is the home of The Institute of Management, Law & Information Science. There is also a research centre on Gogerddan Campus and some administrative departments located in The Old College, the location of the first University of Wales.

GVMM's first involvement with Aberystwyth University was in 2011 installing 6 rooms in the P5 building which was a conversion of a residential block to an academic block. The rooms consisted of 5 seminar size rooms with interactive whiteboards, a 20 PC computer suite and a recording set up in 4 pods with one control room for the Psychology department.

In 2013 the university embarked on a refurbishment programme of 29 teaching spaces at the Llanbadarn Centre and 13 teaching rooms on the Penglais Campus. The extensive project was led by GVMM’s Technical Projects Manager Matthew Price who, working closely with Nigel Thomas at Aberystwyth University, designed a solution commensurate with the brief. A wide variety of spaces were upgraded including video conferencing facilities, large lecture theatres, collaborative teaching spaces, IT teaching rooms and seminar rooms.

The buildings refurbished at Llanbadarn Centre were Rheidol, Elystyn Morgan, the T1 Lecture Theatre and Padarn building – the latter having been fitted with a triple projection system within its 200 seat lecture theatre. Aberystwyth University standardised on the NEC projector range, where appropriate some rooms have Samsung flatscreens. The audio is provided by Ecler speakers, Revolabs and Shure microphones. Control is provided by Extron which is linked to the Lutron lighting system. Most lecterns are Dalen Top-Tec Bravo with JM’s award-winning Prestige lecterns in some of the bigger rooms. All rooms had various configurations of TK-Team writing surfaces. All rooms are configured to work with Panopto lecture capture system and have audio induction loops installed, some of which are phased array to cope with overspill.

In 2014 another 9 rooms were refurbished in the Llandinam Building on Penglais campus. There were some changes to the design, in the main the move to HDbase-T, and the move to Elmo L-12 document camera. In addition to the rooms, a space previously used as a thoroughfare was reconfigured into an open learning space with the addition of 4 Synergy desks from Dalen Top-Tec configured with Samsung 32” screens connected to a PC and connectivity of up to a further 3 devices controlled by Extron MLC 50’s salvaged from the refurbished rooms.

The summer of 2015 sees GVMM back in Aberystwyth University designing and installing AV in 6 more rooms in two buildings on the Penglais campus.